Author: Dr Navin C Naidu

Fabian friends and fiends

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. – Sun Tzu, Chinese strategist Usually attributed to the military, Fabian tactics have been used successfully in the early centuries of empire-sponsored maritime exploration, discovery and conquest; politics and government, and in the

A moral contagion

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion. – Henri Frederic Amiel, Swiss philosopher To reasonably understand law, justice, politics and government where doublespeak and tongue-in-cheek statements concerning public policy are mercilessly unleashed upon a pliant citizenry, one must embark on a one-year study

Daily dosage of derring-do

Fortune befriends the bold.  – John Dryden, English poet When you begin to “thync” different, you will automatically shed being diffident and scale the realms of derring-do. Moving away from forced cowardice to heroic courage is a very natural human tendency. Many of us have experienced this reformation. Helen Keller,

A functioning anarchy

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.   – Edward Abbey, American author It has been said that a concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason, or thrown through the window of governmental deception that shatters it even before the brick finds its mark. It

Freedom of censorship

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. – Mark Twain, American writer Freedom of speech and expression has become a political landmine in that one could get caught in the vortex of one’s thoughts getting wrongly expressed as words swirling

National unity or national calamity?

We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end. – Woodrow T. Wilson, 28th US President The British are forever remembered as the progenitors of the divide-and-rule legerdemain that has fed and nurtured the existing abrasive political culture of its former colonies. Reported

Justice, or just us

Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire, French philosopher, writer and historian There is an incubus living in our midst that voraciously forages on judicial misadventure, juridical misconduct, questionable legislation, corruption at all levels of the civil service, and moral turpitude. This blood-thirsty

Common sense, common law and cow manure

Law reform is too serious a matter to be left to the legal profession. – Leslie G Scarman, Law Lord, UK It is onerous a task these days to decipher the arduous mental effort expended by those who labour on accepting the fact that the law is a living growth,

Elections during an emergency

A hot button issue has cropped up concerning the holding of elections, if indeed one is constitutionally mandated, when a proclamation of emergency is in effect. There are various ways of looking at this issue for finding workable solutions. Article 150(2B) of the Federal Constitution (FC) offers some answers which

The Bohica Syndrome

Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression. – James Madison, 4th US President “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing